Is Google’s Superbowl ad an arguement for Television advertising?

Hell must have frozen over, last night Google aired a :30 second commercial during the SuperBowl. The ad was already in circulation on Youtube, and in fact was part of a series of 7 “search themed” ads. On Feb 6th Eric Schmidt announced the fact that his company had bought the spot on Twitter.

So I thought I would break down the results of Google’s $3,000,000 investment. The SuperBowl, which aired on CBS, was expected to draw an audience of 100,000,000 million. That’s pretty big, but it is largely unmeasurable beyond the audience who saw the ad.

But here is another way to try to measure the impact of the Google SuperBowl Ad. By looking at some of the indicators, beyond the audience size, and I focused in on the view count of the ad entitle “Parisian Love” on on YouTube.

The SuperBowl airing of “Parisian Love” quickly added 600,000+ 800,000+ views to the YouTube upload overnight. See chart from YouTube below. (The extra views are still growing at an rapid pace* as I write this post.) Up until last night night the Video had a little under 1,000,000 views – this is since the ad was posted in Nov 2009.

So was it a valuable investment? Maybe.

I say maybe because it is extremely hard to accurately measure the impact of an advertisement that appears on TV. The best that we can do is look at indicators, like the extra views of the Google Ad on YouTube. It would be really interesting to plot the volume of searches on Google over time next to the airing of the SuperBowl ad; what would the impact of that airing have on volume of searches conducted?

Eric, if you want to send me over those numbers, I would be glad to take a look!